THE

A Letter to the Publisher

Will be looking
forward to the next issue of the Enterprise,
hope your cleanup is coming along as smoothly as can be anticipated.
I was driven
to write you by the death of Princess Diana. This
was a tragic event. Tragic events these days always imply a crisis
and crises demand public policy solutions.
In this
case it is clear that we must have laws against overly
aggressive reporting. The so-called journalists who pursued Diana's
car were clearly exceeding any decent bounds.
When our
Founding Fathers established the First Amendment, they
could not envision the carnage that could be caused by mechanized
presshounds, nor the invasion of privacy made possible by specialized
equipment such as overly powerful telephoto lenses.
Any telephoto
lens of 500mm or over clearly has no value except to
invade privacy and should be banned except for government agencies. A
Presidential Commission should be established to consider limits on
film speeds and number of exposures per roll of film.
Legitimate
reporters will welcome, not fear, any such laws. After
all, it is only in the coverage of personalities and celebrities that
the press shows the slightest evidence of aggressiveness. Mainstream
journalists who largely repackage and publish press conference
handouts will not be affected in the slightest.
These are
common sense ideas, not extremist proposals. If the
press will agree to them now, it may avoid the need for licensing
reporters later.